In some ways, January felt like it lasted forever, and in other ways I can’t believe that it’s over.
I’ve never been more optimistic about a year and what it will bring than I am about 2025.
For one thing, I can’t remember I time where I’ve been more rationally confident than I am now. Maybe it’s being (almost) 40 and having learned some major lessons in humility, resilience, knowing what I am capable of -- who I am. I feel really good, and not in a superficial way.
And then there’s the circumstantial stuff. The stuff that’s outside of my control. It’s never been a better time to be an idea person. Ideas used to have a giant barrier to entry. AI is changing that.
Thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, I have a rationally thinking consult in my pocket. And that consultant is one of the best assistants, thought partners, document creators, insight finders, recipe makers, and advice givers around.
Most of the world is asleep when it comes to the radical tool they have access to, and I feel like I am still peeling my eyelids open and trying to adjust to the flood lights.
I couldn’t fall back asleep the other morning. So, at 4am, I pulled out my to do list and a web browser. In 3 hours, I completed everything I planned on completing over the next week.
With the help and step by step instructions from AI tools:
I wrote a sales process and set up dashboard in my CRM to track KPIs.
I scraped a data list for leads that matched our ideal customer profile.
I wrote an email sequence.
I wrote an objection handling resource for my sales team based on the ones they were hearing the most.
I consolidated two non-matching spreadsheets, eliminating duplicates, for a customer.
I wrote an SOP for a customers’ dispatch team based off a transcript from a meeting and the transcripts of a half a dozen screen recordings.
Productivity is not the same thing as efficiency, but it’s really great when the two line up. I have never been this productive in my life.
And this is just the easy stuff. Every day, I play with new tools that link together little AI programs into an automated process. These are things you used to have to hire a developer to do that you can now do with a drag and drop application.
A friend of mine built a knowledge base app for his team with a no-code tool that lets someone chat with a bot that gets answers about business processes from a database. If the answer is missing or is bad, it emails the person who is most likely able to answer. Their reply goes back into the database and to the person who asked the question. He did most of this by describing what he wanted to a chat app.
Everything is changing.
One thing I think about all of the time is how user interfaces are changing. Right now, must data entry is done by people who benefit the least from the data. They have low incentive to make it accurate and usually have other things to do. So data in most enterprise apps, especially field apps, suffers.
Soon, people will not need to learn how to use software. They will just tell a chat interface what they are trying to do. That chatbot will normalize their text into data and ask for missing information. Data aggregation will be easy and much better.
I hear a people talk about how so much of the buzz around AI is hype. There is a lot of hype to be sure. The thing about any tool, especially time saving tools is this: What are you building with the tool? What are you doing with the extra time?
I try to think about AI this way. What do I want to know? I feel like it’s the killer use case for me.
Search only answers parts of questions. With AI, I can have “conversations” with the answers. I can push back, debate, argue, ask for clarification and more info about what I don’t understand.
AI has increased the value of meetings. At least it has for me. I get transcriptions for as many meetings as a I can. Then I feed the transcript into a reasoning model ChatGPT along with a prompt that asks questions and delegate tasks about what we talked about. Things like:
Give me the action items I need to make sure get done.
Give me ideas for how to be more effective.
Show me things that I may have missed in the conversation that are actually high-value insights.
Wow me with something I haven't thought of asking.
Write me 5 short LinkedIn posts.
Write me a case study I can use to market to new customers.
Write a short follow-up email I can send to everyone.
30 minutes of conversation yields actual production -- real output. It’s wild. This process helped me save a deal the other day. It picked up on something a prospect said that I missed. I sent a follow up email and had a contract request the next day. This process has given me more raw marketing copy based on customer-centric value than I have ever been able to come up with myself.
But mostly, I think the thing that I love the most about this tool, is that I am becoming more curious. I am asking more and better questions. My mind is developing a voracious appetite for knowledge and how to apply it. I have learned and done more in the last month than I did last quarter, and the tools are goin to keep getting better.
This experience kicked off a curiosity that I have not been able to restrain. What is possible? What can this help me do?
--Scott